Scenery of old romances, drunken revelries. Four in the morning getting sick there outside the Mercantile, remember that. Scholarship night. Young then. Mixing memory and desire. Dark remembered walkways. Graveyard of youth.

Is it shame he feels, that hot blood pounding in his ears, or only embarrassment: the minor trifling embarrassment of an awkward situation or the true shame of a moral wrong. How is it possible to know. What can life be made to accommodate, what can one life hold inside itself without breaking.

And that he should be humbled not only by his brain, but by his body also, a complex and beautiful system for the sustenance of life itself.

Peace so intense and complete he could weep. Just to inhabit lightly the space that is cleared for him by her tactful silence.

unlike his brother he doesn’t assign an idiotically high, practically moral degree of value to the concept of normality, which phrased in another way means conformity with the dominant culture.

No you don’t.

Sometimes I just have a feeling. Like a sense of being loved by God, almost. But it’s not really something that can be explained.

That God in his unknowable wisdom and mercy has left him this much. The cool touch of her hand at his face. The flash of chewing gum, the black tights. His mother, his brother, safe and well. Cold wet windswept streets. Books he hasn’t read yet. Opening theme of the Concerto No. 24. His friends, students, colleagues, their kindly and familiar voice

On the library floor below, people entering and leaving, taking phone calls, carrying boxes of documents. On screen in front of him the cursor silently blinking.